Profile

I’m lucky enough to work with lots of scientists from all over the world. In my lab we make transgenic plants using DNA from their favourite gene. This means we can switch the genes off and on to see what they are doing. The scientists will do lots of experiments on the transgenic plants to see how they compare with normal plants. This may involve crushing up parts of the plant to extract DNA, looking close up at plant cells with a microscope, or running samples through a machine to identify all the different chemicals inside.

We use embryos from barley seeds for some of our experiments. You can see the embryo in the top right of this photo. It is about 1.5 mm in diameter. This photo was taken with a microscope.

The embryos are mixed in liquid with bacteria that contains the gene we want to change. The embryos are then grown on petri dishes in clear gel until they grow into little plants. This takes about 10 weeks.

The next photo shows what happens when we put a gene called GUS into our barley embryo. Once the new plant grows we can mix it with a chemical that recognises GUS in the plant and makes it turn blue where the GUS gene is switched on.

First thing in the morning I have a meeting with my team over coffee to catch up on what everyone is doing. Throughout the day I will spend some time on the computer checking results from our latest experiments, working on a report, or preparing slides for a presentation. I will answer emails and deal with questions from other scientists as well as browse the web for new publications of interest. At the moment I am learning all about Synthetic Biology and writing proposals to get funding for some new experiments. Some days I have lab work to do, mainly cloning, and the odd seminar or project meeting to attend.